Nostalgia Unfurls Its Sails In Race Saluting Past : Wooden Boats From Bygone Era Take Part in Corinthian Classic, a Regatta of Great Latitude Off Ventura

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by, And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking, And a grey mist on the sea’s face and the grey dawn breaking. “Sea Fever”--John Masefield

In just minutes, South Gate grandmother Shirley Dallas is going to take her first voyage on a sailboat, something she has always wanted to do. Standing on the foredeck, watching stiff white sails being raised above her, she feels like a kid about to ride a roller coaster.

“To me, even a rowboat is a thrill,” she says, a light westerly wind in her face. “I’ve never been on anything much more exciting than a ferry.”

The Spanish Rake is hardly a ferry. It is a sturdy 82-foot ketch, a wooden ship built in 1932. Purportedly, the Spanish Rake conducted secret military missions in the Pacific during World War II, but now it is used as a charter out of Wilmington.

Creaking with nostalgia, the ship satisfies Dallas’ vision of a sailboat. “She’s always liked the romance of sailing ships,” says her son, Chris Dallas of Agoura, who chartered the Spanish Rake as a belated birthday present for his 67-year-old mother.

Chris, 37, wanted his mother’s maiden sailing voyage to be special, not just a spin around the harbor. He made arrangements to charter the boat for a race, last Saturday’s 17-mile Corinthian Classic, to give Shirley the ride of her life on the ocean off the Oxnard-Ventura coast.

“I’m very excited,” Shirley says, leaning on the starboard railing as the four-man crew prepares to cast off.

But wait: Has she taken any anti-nausea pills? “No,” she says, “I’m living dangerously.”

Despite gray skies, the forecast calls for clearing, with 18-knot winds and little chop, practically perfect conditions for the easily queasy. And Spanish Rake skipper Kevin Cassady isn’t planning to make waves.

“I’m not out to win,” he says. “Just to have fun. This is the only race I enter. I usually don’t like races because they’re too competitive--boats trying to cut you off--but this one is different.”

How different? “It’s kind of a relaxed race,” says race organizer Dick McNish, a competitor and member of the Pacific Corinthian Yacht Club in Oxnard, which is sponsoring the race for the 13th year in a row.

“This is a gentlemanly race from a bygone era,” says C. F. Koehler Jr., skipper of the Sally.

Indeed, the Corinthian Classic would not remind anybody of the America’s Cup, in which competitors do virtually everything but fire broadsides to win. “Nobody but an idiot would go out in this race and play bumper boats,” Koehler says.

The Corinthian Classic is restricted to wooden boats built or designed before 1952. It’s like a road race for classic cars: Competitors are out to show off their old beauties and avoid any scratches.

The yacht club refers to the 34-boat field as “the living history fleet.” Most of the boats have been completely restored. “They’d die if you didn’t take care of them,” Koehler says, adding that their precarious nature creates camaraderie among the owners. “You talk to the guy next to you about how to fix problems in your old wooden boat.”

Koehler’s boat is a sleek 10-meter sloop, made for racing. It is one of 14 10-meters built in 1928 by Starling Burgess, who also designed America’s Cup boats. Koehler says he did research on Starling’s 10-meters and found newspaper stories describing them as “the hottest new things” on water. “They were the rage for a couple of years,” says Koehler, who lives in San Diego.

The Spanish Rake certainly was never the rage. She began life as a cargo ship, the Marguerite, making voyages from the West Coast to Alaska with as many as 28 tons of building materials in her hold. Cassady found her in 1981, bought her for $50,000 in ’86. She looked like a derelict then.

“I mostly made cosmetic changes,” Cassady says. “I still have a long way to go, but at least she’s presentable.”

Built to handle rough seas, the Spanish Rake is strong but slow. In light winds, she barely creeps along, unlike the graceful sloops. To compensate for the variety of boats in the race, the yacht club uses a handicap system.

The slowest boats go out first. Sally is the scratch boat, sailing 26 minutes behind the next-to-last boat and about two hours after the first boat.

“This happens to us a lot,” says Kim Hemphill, a Sally crew member. “We have to come from behind all the time.”

The boats sail up the channel at Oxnard Harbor, pass the last breakwater and head to the starting buoy in open waters just south of the harbor entrance. A few spectators have lined the shore, but they are disappointed. There is no real parade of boats--they just seem to straggle out of the channel among the yachts and modern sailboats--and the start is impossible to see from shore.

“I think I heard a cannon go off,” a spectator says, aiming a telephoto lens toward the sound.

About two hours later, sails begin appearing on the horizon. The boat with the fastest elapsed time is the Stanhaven, a 56-foot yawl captained by Lee Stanley of Agoura. Sally is five minutes behind the Stanhaven. The Spanish Rake is the fifth ketch across the finish line.

Shirley Dallas had “a wonderful time.” But living dangerously, she left something behind--her noon meal.

“I was really hungry, but I guess I shouldn’t have eaten,” she says. “It didn’t sit too well. I just didn’t have my sea legs.”

By the next day, however, she has forgotten seasickness and remembers only the sea. “I had trouble doing housework,” she says. “All I could think about was sailing to Tahiti.”